[pca] PCA Best Practices?

[Jeff A. Earickson]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Ray Van Dolson wrote:

> Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 09:14:04 -0700
> From: Ray Van Dolson <rvandolson at esri.com>
> To: pca at lists.univie.ac.at
> Subject: [pca] PCA Best Practices?
> 
> Hello all.  I've long been frustrated by the way Solaris updates seem
> to work.  I'm used to the Linux world where a simple yum update or
> up2date command can show me what's available and makes it easy to
> apply.

Join the growing crowd who love Linux patching and hate Sun patching
products.

>
> smpatch, Solaris Update Manager all had their weird little quirks.
> I've just been looking for a way to easily get all Solaris machines to
> send me nightly notification of what patches are available so it
> becomes as easy to keep them up to date as it is our Linux machines.
> pca appears to fit that need perfectly!
>
> How are most of you using it in your infrastructure?  I'm starting to
> add it to cron jobs to email me nightly output of pca -l missing and
> I'm thinking of parsing the output from this into a database so we can
> get a good overview of what systems need what at a glance.  In
> addition, is it possible to point pca at a local patch server?  Sounds
> like the dev version lets you do some caching so we can avoid
> re-downloading things from Sun unnecessarily.

I added a simple "pca" command into my nightly summary reports of my
Sun systems, to show what patches a particular machine needs.

Since my home directory is NFS mounted to all Sun servers, it serves
as my patch depot.  When I run "pca -i -n" or "pca -i", the patches are
downloaded there for every machine to access.  I run "pca -i -n" every
couple of days on most machines to keep non-rebootable patches to a
minimum.  It is trivially easy with pca.  I do the rebootable patches
at scheduled maintanence time.

Life has been good since I discovered pca.  But I'm still moving the
bulk of my servers/business to Linux (redhat). Sayonara Sun.

Jeff Earickson
Colby College